'Wood-John'': A Swedish Pioneer in Minnesota

"WOOD-JOHN": A SWEDISH PIONEER IN
MINNESOTA
SHERMAN E . JOHNSON
"Wood-John" was my grandfather. This is an attempt to tell
the story of his life as a pioneer woodsman, farmer, soldier,
dealer in wood and charcoal, custom land-breaker, and operator
of a brickyard. He emigrated from Sweden in 1853, and after
working in logging camps and sawmills finally settled in the
Scandia community, the oldest Swedish settlement in Minne­sota1
Wood-John was born in Malmbäck parish, Jönköpings län,
Sweden, on January 11, 1828. He was christened Nils Johan, and
as the son of Johannes Nilsson took the surname Johnson on
arrival in the United States. His dealings in cordwood and char­coal
earned him the nickname of "Wood-John," "Ved-Jan"
among his Swedish neighbors. He was known as Wood-John
in the county seat town of Stillwater, where most of the wood
and charcoal was sold, as well as throughout the countryside
where he did custom land breaking. As a small boy I saw letters
addressed to him as "Wood-John."
Wood-John left no written records of his activities. His mili­tary
discharge papers, deeds and other records were destroyed
by fire when the big brick house on the family homestead burned
in 1905. I have attempted to reconstruct his career with the aid
of church records in Sweden and in Scandia, Minnesota, from
Washington County historical items, and his Civil War record
from the National Archives.2
Grandfather revealed very little about his Swedish back­ground.
I was 12 years old when he died on January 2, 1909,
and although I had heard him tell many stories about his experi­ences
in the pineries and work in the sawmills, I don't recall
that he related any incidents about his life in Sweden. My fa­ther
evidently knew very little about Grandfather's Swedish
background. Apparently there was no written contact with the
274
homeland. Sweden had been left behind and Grandfather was
preoccupied with adjustment to the new environment.
Information from The House of Emigrants in Växjö indicates
that Nils Johan, my grandfather, was born January 11, 1828,
in Malmbäck parish, Jönköpings län, that he was the oldest
child of crofter Johannes Nilsson and his wife Carin Larsdotter.
His parents were born in 1794 and 1793 respectively, thus they
were thirty-four and thirty-five years old at his birth. There
were two other children in the family, brother Johannes born
1833, and sister Fredrica born 1837. I was told by my father
that his grandmother was the daughter of a vicar, but the Malm­bäck
records have no information on the place of her birth or
her background.
No information is available on Nils Johan's early life. As the
son of a crofter he probably had to make his own way rather
early. Presumably those early lessons in self-reliance were put
to use in the later pioneer environment. He emigrated from
Sweden at the age of twenty-five, leaving Malmbäck on May 21,
1853. By that time he must have completed the required mili­tary
service, and somehow obtained money for passage to the
United States.
My father told me that Grandfather was one of five young
Swedes who came to Chicago in the late summer of 1853. The
journey over was on a sailing vessel that encountered contrary
winds. I was told that they had to ration drinking water dur­ing
the last part of the voyage. The young Swedes found work
on a railroad over the winter. In the spring two of them struck
out for the gold fields of California. My grandfather and the
other two journeyed up the Mississippi and the St. Croix Rivers
to Stillwater, where they found employment in a sawmill dur­ing
the summer. In the fall they went "up river" to a logging
camp and then in the spring helped drive the logs down the
river, and again found work in the sawmill for the summer.
Grandfather followed this cycle of employment for four years,
but during his summer work he had picked out and bought a
tract of land overlooking the St. Croix river near what is now
Somerset, Wisconsin. He had also met Christina Bengtson, a
young immigrant girl from Scandia who worked as a waitress in
a boarding house which catered to the men driving logs down the
275
river. They were married November 17, 1858, when he was
thirty years old and she was nineteen. They settled on the place
near the river and stayed there for nearly two years. But his
young wife was very lonesome in her new home. The neighbor­ing
settlers were French Canadians. They knew some English,
and Grandfather by that time was sufficiently familiar with
English to converse with them in that language, but Grand­mother
knew little English and could not communicate with
her neighbors. She finally persuaded Grandfather to sell that
place and buy 80 acres of land in the immigrant community
of Scandia, where her parents were living. They moved to a
log cabin in that settlement in 1860. Emil, their oldest child,
who was my father, was an infant when they moved to their
new home.
On the new place Grandfather cleared the land of oak, birch,
poplar, and other deciduous trees. In the early years, he con­verted
the wood to charcoal. He bought an ox team to haul
charcoal twenty miles to Stillwater, where it was sold to the
the blacksmith shops. But the trip with oxen required starting
about four o'clock in the morning of one day and staying over­night
with an Irish settler about six miles from Stillwater. The
next morning he would go on to Stillwater, unload, and then
return home, perhaps by midnight of the second day.
As soon as he could, he bought horses and mules to haul wood
and charcoal and to break the land. He did custom breaking
for neighbors who had no animal power, and he bought cordwood
from them to be sold in Stillwater or in the little logging town
of Marine Mills. As he accumulated money from the sale of
wood and charcoal, and from custom breaking, he bought and
cleared more land until he owned 640 acres, which was a very
large farm in the Scandia community at that time.
The son of a Scandia pioneer, writing from memory in his
later years, recorded his impressions of my Grandfather as
follows:
"Cordwood, now seldom seen, was the principal item of com­merce
between the Scandia community, Stillwater and St. Paul.
Wheat growing was to follow, but the woods had to be gotten
out of the way first.
"Johnson was a dealer in cordwood. With two yoke of oxen
276
and two cords of wood for his load, followed by his small son
tied to the load so that he would not fall off, the procession led
to the landing below Otisville. Payments were made by Mr.
Johnson in gold or other currency from his bandana handker­chief
tied in the four corners. Banks were still unheard of.
" F r om his brickyard he donated the bricks for Scandia's first
brick church. In search of markets he made a trip on a swayed-back
horse in vain as far as Cambridge.
" F o r doing custom land breaking he had a special 23-inch
plow, drawn by three mule teams and a team of horses for lead­ers.
With Mr. Johnson holding this monstrous plow, one man
with a forked stick to keep it from choking with debris and four
teamsters, the newly cleared land was ready for the farmer's
use. Once it was my fortune to see this array of power in opera­tion
on land now owned by Carl Jackson and to follow bare­footed
behind in such a monstrous furrow as I have never seen
since. As a hard worker, he may be rated as a king among pio­neers."
3 The small son mentioned in the quotation was my father.
He told me several times about being tied to a load of wood on
the trip to Stillwater.
Wood-John would have served as an excellent model for Vil¬
helm Moberg's hero, Karl Oscar, in his trilogy portraying the
experiences of settlers in the adjoining Swedish settlement
of Chisago Lake.4 He had the qualities and aptitudes of a suc­cessful
pioneer and community developer. He combined hard
work with an optimistic outlook and strong motivation for im­provement
of conditions. He had brains as well as brawn, and
both were needed to cope with emergencies and to perform all
the tasks required for self-sufficient living in at least "make-do"
fashion. More than that, however, he had the initiative and en­terprise
to market wood and charcoal, undertake custom break­ing
and other activities in addition to farm operations.
Although Wood-John married a girl named Christina she did
not fit the Christina model of the Moberg trilogy. She had ar­rived
in Scandia with her parents in 1853 at the age of fourteen.
The family came from Asarum, Blekinge, where her father had
owned a farm. Thus the break with Sweden had been made
by her parents, and she had already established roots in Scan­dia
when she married my Grandfather. She looked forward
277
to living in the new land, but that meant Scandia, the home
of her parents, relatives, and friends. She was not always the
long-suffering heroine portrayed by Moberg's Christina. For
example, she insisted on selling the farm on the Wisconsin
side of the St. Croix River and moving to Scandia. She put
her foot down on other occasions, when Wood-John would give
in with a smile.
Nevertheless, she was a good helpmeet in a pioneer family.
They raised ten children to adulthood. And she had to do both
the household and farmstead chores while Grandfather was on
trips to town, doing custom breaking, and so forth. She trained
the children to help with this work as soon as they were able.
Farmstead chores included gardening, raising chickens, feed­ing
and milking cows, and making butter. Butter made in the
spring and summer months was heavily salted and kept in jars
to be sold for winter use in the logging camps.
Despite hardships, Grandmother had many pleasant memories
of pioneer days. She would say that she was never as warm in
the winter time as in the old log house, not even in the big brick
house of later years, which of course had no central heating.
She was a conscientious charter member of the Swedish L u ­theran
church in Scandia, where her father had been elected
one of the first deacons in 1855. She taught the children to read
Swedish and to prepare for confirmation and church member­ship.
Grandfather joined the church when they moved to Scan­dia
in 1860. They probably went to church with the children
quite regularly, at Grandmother's insistence. Wood-John was
never a church officer, however. He probably was not that at­tentive
to church affairs, because of immersion in other activi­ties.
After church, I can visualize him making arrangements for
custom breaking or some other workday job.
Aside from a Bible, the Lutheran Catechism, and perhaps two
or three other Swedish books, there was little intellectual stimu­lation
for the children in Wood-John's household. The emphasis
was on work and farm development. My father, who was the
oldest child, was sixteen years old before a schoolhouse was
built near their home. He had, of course, learned English on
trips to town, and in other outside activities with his father. On
his own initiative he attended school for about two months in
278
each of two years. The next oldest son had even less exposure
to English schooling, but the younger children went to school
intermittently when they were not needed at home. This was
also true of the neighbor children.
The Civil War was raging during the first years when Wood-
John was getting established in Scandia. As an immigrant pio­neer
he was probably too busy making a living to pay much
attention to what he heard about it on trips to Stillwater, or at
church in Scandia; but it came home forcefully when his name
came up in the draft call in early 1865. He was then thirty-seven
years old, with three children, and his wife expecting a fourth.
Although he could have tried to pay for a replacement he de­cided
to serve. He was mustered in at Fort Snelling on March
17, 1865, and was sent as reinforcement to Company D, Second
Minnesota Infantry Regiment, a part of General Sherman's Army
then marching northward through the Carolina. After General
Johnston's surrender they marched through Richmond, Virginia,
to Washington, where they participated in the Grand Review on
May 24, 1865. They were mustered out at Louisville, Kentucky
on July 11, 1865.
I was told that when my Grandfather gave his name as Nils
Johan Johnson to the sergeant who enrolled him in the army,
the latter responded, "That makes no sense. I am recording
your name as John Nels Johnson." His service records contain
sworn statements indicating the reversal of the given names and
the change from Nils to Nels. He latter used the name John Nels
Johnson or J . N. Johnson, but many people knew him only as
Wood-John.
On returning from war service my grandfather bought more
land, and pursued land clearing, the purchase and sale of cord-wood,
and custom breaking with renewed vigor. His four sons
joined in these activities as soon as they were able to help.
The custom-breaking enterprise was greatly expanded. They
broke most of the land cleared by the first generation of settlers
in Scandia and May townships of Washington County, and some
in adjacent Chisago County.
The son of a later settler in the Areola community (named
for a now abandoned sawmill village between Marine and Still­water)
told about Wood-John "breaking all the land for miles
279
around." He also quotes Wood-John's slogan as "never back up
with a breaking plow."5 This lesson was brought home to me,
when nearly a half century I assisted my father in breaking land
that had a thick stand of hazel brush about five feet tall. We had
an old 16-inch breaking plow resurrected from the old home­stead.
It had a long beam and a knife coulter that constantly
had to be cleared of debris. A heavy logging chain was attached
to the beam to pull the brush down to be covered by the for­ward
movement of the moldboard. It was my job to clear the
debris, and to see that the chain was functioning. A neighbor
drove the four-horse team and my father guided the plow. He
had learned his lesson well, and his command was to go forward
regardless of the toughness of the roots.
Wood-John's farming operation prospered in the Post-Civil War
years. As more land was bought and cleared, wheat was grown
for sale to the mills in Marine and Stillwater, and oats were in
demand for horse feed. The grain harvest was mechanized at
first with a reaper, later a platform harvester, and finally a twine
binder. Father told me about the first mechanical threshing be­ing
performed by a custom operator from the Chisago Lake
settlement. He had a thresher operated with horse power. Later
threshing was done by steam power, but Wood-John never
owned a thresher. Threshing was always a custom job.
There was a growing market for timothy hay for horse feed
in Marine and Stillwater. Most of the hay was hauled and sold
in the winter time, which furnished winter employment for
men and horses that were occupied with farming and custom
breaking in the spring and summer months. By this time the
home farm had been rounded out to the 640 acres mentioned
earlier. My father and his younger brother had also bought a
160-acre farm adjoining the home place. My father took his bride
to that farm house in 1886.
Wood-John's last business venture ended in failure. He had
discovered good brick clay on the home farm and he envisioned
that all the farmers in the community would at least need new
chimneys in the houses that would replace the log cabins. He
also hoped to sell them brick for outer wall construction. He
started a brickyard and employed a brickmaker who had learned
the craft in his native Germany.
280
Large quantities of brick were made and sold for several years,
including brick for a new store in Scandia. As mentioned by
Forsell, brick was donated for the new church in Scandia that
was built to replace a frame structure destroyed by a tornado in
1884.1! The old Hay Lake Schoolhouse, near the site of the first
settlement in Scandia, is built of brick from Wood-John's kiln.
It was named a State Museum in 1974. Brick was also loaded
on rafts and floated down the river for sale in Stillwater.
The venture seemed to prosper in the early years and Grand­father
persuaded my father to sell his farm and to take charge
of operations at the brickyard. Then came the depression of
the 1890s. Brick was sold on credit and the bills were not col­lectible
under depression conditions, and the market tended to
disappear as the depression deepened. After sustaining heavy
losses the brickyard was finally abandoned and much of the
family homestead was sold off to pay brickyard debts. Wood-
John's spirit was broken by this turn of events. His sons were
so frustrated by the experience that they always approached
new activities with extreme caution.
After liquidating the brickyard and paying all debts, Grand­father
distributed the remaining land among the four sons. The
family farmstead with one hundred acres of land was given to
the youngest son under an agreement that the parents would
make their home with him. The other three sons received eighty
acres each, which they had to mortgage in order to build modest
houses and outbuildings.
Grandfather then became the retired pioneer settler I knew
as a boy. He continued to help with the work on the home farm
and occasionally on the farms of his other sons, but he was the
helper instead of the boss. His Civil War pension gave him some
financial independence, and he retained good physical and men­tal
health until a few weeks before his death in 1909 at the age
of eighty-one, following a prostate operation. His wife Chris­tina
lived on for fourteen years, and died in 1923 at the age of
eighty-four.
Despite the failure of Wood-John's last business venture he
made an enormous contribution to the development of the Scan­dia
community and adjacent areas. In many respects he was
a "king among pioneers."7
281
NOTES
' See Anna Enquist, S c a n d i a T h e n and N o w (Stillwater, Minn.: The
Croixside Press, 1974), for the story of the settlement. In the early years
it was known as the Marine Settlement, as it was several miles inland
from the logging town of Marine Mills on the St. Croix River. Scandia
did not acquire a post office until 1878.
21 am indebted to the Emigrant Institute, Växjö, Sweden for informa­tion
from the Malmbäck parish records. Information from the fiftieth-anniversary
volume of the Elim Lutheran Church in Scandia, M i n n e s ­a
l b u m 1 8 5 4 - 1 9 0 4 , was supplemented by a search of the available church
records by Pastor J. Orville Martin in 1974. The National Archives
furnished complete Civil War enlistment, service, and pension records.
Rev. Edward D. Neill's H i s t o r y of W a s h i n g t o n C o u n t y and t h e S t . C r o i x
V a l l e y (Minneapolis: North Star Publishing Co., 1881) contains a short
account of my Grandfather's operations at that time.
aM. J. Forsell, "Cogitations: Nels Johan Johnson," in "The Heritage of
a Century: Elim Lutheran Church, 1854-1954," special centennial issue
of the E l i m M e s s e n g e r (Scandia, Minn.), Vol. 14, No. 5, May 1954, p. 5.
4 Vilhelm Moberg, T h e E m i g r a n t s , U n t o a G o o d L a n d , and T h e L a s t
L e t t e r H o m e , translated by Gustaf Lannestock, published by Simon &
Shuster, New York, 1951, 1954, and 1961.
15 Harry W. Palm, L u m b e r j a c k D a y s in t h e S t . C r o i x V a l l e y (Bayport,
Minn.: Bayport Printing House, Inc., 1969), 19.
' I b i d . , 5.
' The characterization used by Forsell in I b i d . , 5.
282

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

All rights held by the Swedish-American Historical Society. No part of this publication, except in the case of brief quotations, may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the editor and, where appropriate, the original author(s). For more information, please email the Society at info@swedishamericanhist.org

"WOOD-JOHN": A SWEDISH PIONEER IN
MINNESOTA
SHERMAN E . JOHNSON
"Wood-John" was my grandfather. This is an attempt to tell
the story of his life as a pioneer woodsman, farmer, soldier,
dealer in wood and charcoal, custom land-breaker, and operator
of a brickyard. He emigrated from Sweden in 1853, and after
working in logging camps and sawmills finally settled in the
Scandia community, the oldest Swedish settlement in Minne­sota1
Wood-John was born in Malmbäck parish, Jönköpings län,
Sweden, on January 11, 1828. He was christened Nils Johan, and
as the son of Johannes Nilsson took the surname Johnson on
arrival in the United States. His dealings in cordwood and char­coal
earned him the nickname of "Wood-John," "Ved-Jan"
among his Swedish neighbors. He was known as Wood-John
in the county seat town of Stillwater, where most of the wood
and charcoal was sold, as well as throughout the countryside
where he did custom land breaking. As a small boy I saw letters
addressed to him as "Wood-John."
Wood-John left no written records of his activities. His mili­tary
discharge papers, deeds and other records were destroyed
by fire when the big brick house on the family homestead burned
in 1905. I have attempted to reconstruct his career with the aid
of church records in Sweden and in Scandia, Minnesota, from
Washington County historical items, and his Civil War record
from the National Archives.2
Grandfather revealed very little about his Swedish back­ground.
I was 12 years old when he died on January 2, 1909,
and although I had heard him tell many stories about his experi­ences
in the pineries and work in the sawmills, I don't recall
that he related any incidents about his life in Sweden. My fa­ther
evidently knew very little about Grandfather's Swedish
background. Apparently there was no written contact with the
274
homeland. Sweden had been left behind and Grandfather was
preoccupied with adjustment to the new environment.
Information from The House of Emigrants in Växjö indicates
that Nils Johan, my grandfather, was born January 11, 1828,
in Malmbäck parish, Jönköpings län, that he was the oldest
child of crofter Johannes Nilsson and his wife Carin Larsdotter.
His parents were born in 1794 and 1793 respectively, thus they
were thirty-four and thirty-five years old at his birth. There
were two other children in the family, brother Johannes born
1833, and sister Fredrica born 1837. I was told by my father
that his grandmother was the daughter of a vicar, but the Malm­bäck
records have no information on the place of her birth or
her background.
No information is available on Nils Johan's early life. As the
son of a crofter he probably had to make his own way rather
early. Presumably those early lessons in self-reliance were put
to use in the later pioneer environment. He emigrated from
Sweden at the age of twenty-five, leaving Malmbäck on May 21,
1853. By that time he must have completed the required mili­tary
service, and somehow obtained money for passage to the
United States.
My father told me that Grandfather was one of five young
Swedes who came to Chicago in the late summer of 1853. The
journey over was on a sailing vessel that encountered contrary
winds. I was told that they had to ration drinking water dur­ing
the last part of the voyage. The young Swedes found work
on a railroad over the winter. In the spring two of them struck
out for the gold fields of California. My grandfather and the
other two journeyed up the Mississippi and the St. Croix Rivers
to Stillwater, where they found employment in a sawmill dur­ing
the summer. In the fall they went "up river" to a logging
camp and then in the spring helped drive the logs down the
river, and again found work in the sawmill for the summer.
Grandfather followed this cycle of employment for four years,
but during his summer work he had picked out and bought a
tract of land overlooking the St. Croix river near what is now
Somerset, Wisconsin. He had also met Christina Bengtson, a
young immigrant girl from Scandia who worked as a waitress in
a boarding house which catered to the men driving logs down the
275
river. They were married November 17, 1858, when he was
thirty years old and she was nineteen. They settled on the place
near the river and stayed there for nearly two years. But his
young wife was very lonesome in her new home. The neighbor­ing
settlers were French Canadians. They knew some English,
and Grandfather by that time was sufficiently familiar with
English to converse with them in that language, but Grand­mother
knew little English and could not communicate with
her neighbors. She finally persuaded Grandfather to sell that
place and buy 80 acres of land in the immigrant community
of Scandia, where her parents were living. They moved to a
log cabin in that settlement in 1860. Emil, their oldest child,
who was my father, was an infant when they moved to their
new home.
On the new place Grandfather cleared the land of oak, birch,
poplar, and other deciduous trees. In the early years, he con­verted
the wood to charcoal. He bought an ox team to haul
charcoal twenty miles to Stillwater, where it was sold to the
the blacksmith shops. But the trip with oxen required starting
about four o'clock in the morning of one day and staying over­night
with an Irish settler about six miles from Stillwater. The
next morning he would go on to Stillwater, unload, and then
return home, perhaps by midnight of the second day.
As soon as he could, he bought horses and mules to haul wood
and charcoal and to break the land. He did custom breaking
for neighbors who had no animal power, and he bought cordwood
from them to be sold in Stillwater or in the little logging town
of Marine Mills. As he accumulated money from the sale of
wood and charcoal, and from custom breaking, he bought and
cleared more land until he owned 640 acres, which was a very
large farm in the Scandia community at that time.
The son of a Scandia pioneer, writing from memory in his
later years, recorded his impressions of my Grandfather as
follows:
"Cordwood, now seldom seen, was the principal item of com­merce
between the Scandia community, Stillwater and St. Paul.
Wheat growing was to follow, but the woods had to be gotten
out of the way first.
"Johnson was a dealer in cordwood. With two yoke of oxen
276
and two cords of wood for his load, followed by his small son
tied to the load so that he would not fall off, the procession led
to the landing below Otisville. Payments were made by Mr.
Johnson in gold or other currency from his bandana handker­chief
tied in the four corners. Banks were still unheard of.
" F r om his brickyard he donated the bricks for Scandia's first
brick church. In search of markets he made a trip on a swayed-back
horse in vain as far as Cambridge.
" F o r doing custom land breaking he had a special 23-inch
plow, drawn by three mule teams and a team of horses for lead­ers.
With Mr. Johnson holding this monstrous plow, one man
with a forked stick to keep it from choking with debris and four
teamsters, the newly cleared land was ready for the farmer's
use. Once it was my fortune to see this array of power in opera­tion
on land now owned by Carl Jackson and to follow bare­footed
behind in such a monstrous furrow as I have never seen
since. As a hard worker, he may be rated as a king among pio­neers."
3 The small son mentioned in the quotation was my father.
He told me several times about being tied to a load of wood on
the trip to Stillwater.
Wood-John would have served as an excellent model for Vil¬
helm Moberg's hero, Karl Oscar, in his trilogy portraying the
experiences of settlers in the adjoining Swedish settlement
of Chisago Lake.4 He had the qualities and aptitudes of a suc­cessful
pioneer and community developer. He combined hard
work with an optimistic outlook and strong motivation for im­provement
of conditions. He had brains as well as brawn, and
both were needed to cope with emergencies and to perform all
the tasks required for self-sufficient living in at least "make-do"
fashion. More than that, however, he had the initiative and en­terprise
to market wood and charcoal, undertake custom break­ing
and other activities in addition to farm operations.
Although Wood-John married a girl named Christina she did
not fit the Christina model of the Moberg trilogy. She had ar­rived
in Scandia with her parents in 1853 at the age of fourteen.
The family came from Asarum, Blekinge, where her father had
owned a farm. Thus the break with Sweden had been made
by her parents, and she had already established roots in Scan­dia
when she married my Grandfather. She looked forward
277
to living in the new land, but that meant Scandia, the home
of her parents, relatives, and friends. She was not always the
long-suffering heroine portrayed by Moberg's Christina. For
example, she insisted on selling the farm on the Wisconsin
side of the St. Croix River and moving to Scandia. She put
her foot down on other occasions, when Wood-John would give
in with a smile.
Nevertheless, she was a good helpmeet in a pioneer family.
They raised ten children to adulthood. And she had to do both
the household and farmstead chores while Grandfather was on
trips to town, doing custom breaking, and so forth. She trained
the children to help with this work as soon as they were able.
Farmstead chores included gardening, raising chickens, feed­ing
and milking cows, and making butter. Butter made in the
spring and summer months was heavily salted and kept in jars
to be sold for winter use in the logging camps.
Despite hardships, Grandmother had many pleasant memories
of pioneer days. She would say that she was never as warm in
the winter time as in the old log house, not even in the big brick
house of later years, which of course had no central heating.
She was a conscientious charter member of the Swedish L u ­theran
church in Scandia, where her father had been elected
one of the first deacons in 1855. She taught the children to read
Swedish and to prepare for confirmation and church member­ship.
Grandfather joined the church when they moved to Scan­dia
in 1860. They probably went to church with the children
quite regularly, at Grandmother's insistence. Wood-John was
never a church officer, however. He probably was not that at­tentive
to church affairs, because of immersion in other activi­ties.
After church, I can visualize him making arrangements for
custom breaking or some other workday job.
Aside from a Bible, the Lutheran Catechism, and perhaps two
or three other Swedish books, there was little intellectual stimu­lation
for the children in Wood-John's household. The emphasis
was on work and farm development. My father, who was the
oldest child, was sixteen years old before a schoolhouse was
built near their home. He had, of course, learned English on
trips to town, and in other outside activities with his father. On
his own initiative he attended school for about two months in
278
each of two years. The next oldest son had even less exposure
to English schooling, but the younger children went to school
intermittently when they were not needed at home. This was
also true of the neighbor children.
The Civil War was raging during the first years when Wood-
John was getting established in Scandia. As an immigrant pio­neer
he was probably too busy making a living to pay much
attention to what he heard about it on trips to Stillwater, or at
church in Scandia; but it came home forcefully when his name
came up in the draft call in early 1865. He was then thirty-seven
years old, with three children, and his wife expecting a fourth.
Although he could have tried to pay for a replacement he de­cided
to serve. He was mustered in at Fort Snelling on March
17, 1865, and was sent as reinforcement to Company D, Second
Minnesota Infantry Regiment, a part of General Sherman's Army
then marching northward through the Carolina. After General
Johnston's surrender they marched through Richmond, Virginia,
to Washington, where they participated in the Grand Review on
May 24, 1865. They were mustered out at Louisville, Kentucky
on July 11, 1865.
I was told that when my Grandfather gave his name as Nils
Johan Johnson to the sergeant who enrolled him in the army,
the latter responded, "That makes no sense. I am recording
your name as John Nels Johnson." His service records contain
sworn statements indicating the reversal of the given names and
the change from Nils to Nels. He latter used the name John Nels
Johnson or J . N. Johnson, but many people knew him only as
Wood-John.
On returning from war service my grandfather bought more
land, and pursued land clearing, the purchase and sale of cord-wood,
and custom breaking with renewed vigor. His four sons
joined in these activities as soon as they were able to help.
The custom-breaking enterprise was greatly expanded. They
broke most of the land cleared by the first generation of settlers
in Scandia and May townships of Washington County, and some
in adjacent Chisago County.
The son of a later settler in the Areola community (named
for a now abandoned sawmill village between Marine and Still­water)
told about Wood-John "breaking all the land for miles
279
around." He also quotes Wood-John's slogan as "never back up
with a breaking plow."5 This lesson was brought home to me,
when nearly a half century I assisted my father in breaking land
that had a thick stand of hazel brush about five feet tall. We had
an old 16-inch breaking plow resurrected from the old home­stead.
It had a long beam and a knife coulter that constantly
had to be cleared of debris. A heavy logging chain was attached
to the beam to pull the brush down to be covered by the for­ward
movement of the moldboard. It was my job to clear the
debris, and to see that the chain was functioning. A neighbor
drove the four-horse team and my father guided the plow. He
had learned his lesson well, and his command was to go forward
regardless of the toughness of the roots.
Wood-John's farming operation prospered in the Post-Civil War
years. As more land was bought and cleared, wheat was grown
for sale to the mills in Marine and Stillwater, and oats were in
demand for horse feed. The grain harvest was mechanized at
first with a reaper, later a platform harvester, and finally a twine
binder. Father told me about the first mechanical threshing be­ing
performed by a custom operator from the Chisago Lake
settlement. He had a thresher operated with horse power. Later
threshing was done by steam power, but Wood-John never
owned a thresher. Threshing was always a custom job.
There was a growing market for timothy hay for horse feed
in Marine and Stillwater. Most of the hay was hauled and sold
in the winter time, which furnished winter employment for
men and horses that were occupied with farming and custom
breaking in the spring and summer months. By this time the
home farm had been rounded out to the 640 acres mentioned
earlier. My father and his younger brother had also bought a
160-acre farm adjoining the home place. My father took his bride
to that farm house in 1886.
Wood-John's last business venture ended in failure. He had
discovered good brick clay on the home farm and he envisioned
that all the farmers in the community would at least need new
chimneys in the houses that would replace the log cabins. He
also hoped to sell them brick for outer wall construction. He
started a brickyard and employed a brickmaker who had learned
the craft in his native Germany.
280
Large quantities of brick were made and sold for several years,
including brick for a new store in Scandia. As mentioned by
Forsell, brick was donated for the new church in Scandia that
was built to replace a frame structure destroyed by a tornado in
1884.1! The old Hay Lake Schoolhouse, near the site of the first
settlement in Scandia, is built of brick from Wood-John's kiln.
It was named a State Museum in 1974. Brick was also loaded
on rafts and floated down the river for sale in Stillwater.
The venture seemed to prosper in the early years and Grand­father
persuaded my father to sell his farm and to take charge
of operations at the brickyard. Then came the depression of
the 1890s. Brick was sold on credit and the bills were not col­lectible
under depression conditions, and the market tended to
disappear as the depression deepened. After sustaining heavy
losses the brickyard was finally abandoned and much of the
family homestead was sold off to pay brickyard debts. Wood-
John's spirit was broken by this turn of events. His sons were
so frustrated by the experience that they always approached
new activities with extreme caution.
After liquidating the brickyard and paying all debts, Grand­father
distributed the remaining land among the four sons. The
family farmstead with one hundred acres of land was given to
the youngest son under an agreement that the parents would
make their home with him. The other three sons received eighty
acres each, which they had to mortgage in order to build modest
houses and outbuildings.
Grandfather then became the retired pioneer settler I knew
as a boy. He continued to help with the work on the home farm
and occasionally on the farms of his other sons, but he was the
helper instead of the boss. His Civil War pension gave him some
financial independence, and he retained good physical and men­tal
health until a few weeks before his death in 1909 at the age
of eighty-one, following a prostate operation. His wife Chris­tina
lived on for fourteen years, and died in 1923 at the age of
eighty-four.
Despite the failure of Wood-John's last business venture he
made an enormous contribution to the development of the Scan­dia
community and adjacent areas. In many respects he was
a "king among pioneers."7
281
NOTES
' See Anna Enquist, S c a n d i a T h e n and N o w (Stillwater, Minn.: The
Croixside Press, 1974), for the story of the settlement. In the early years
it was known as the Marine Settlement, as it was several miles inland
from the logging town of Marine Mills on the St. Croix River. Scandia
did not acquire a post office until 1878.
21 am indebted to the Emigrant Institute, Växjö, Sweden for informa­tion
from the Malmbäck parish records. Information from the fiftieth-anniversary
volume of the Elim Lutheran Church in Scandia, M i n n e s ­a
l b u m 1 8 5 4 - 1 9 0 4 , was supplemented by a search of the available church
records by Pastor J. Orville Martin in 1974. The National Archives
furnished complete Civil War enlistment, service, and pension records.
Rev. Edward D. Neill's H i s t o r y of W a s h i n g t o n C o u n t y and t h e S t . C r o i x
V a l l e y (Minneapolis: North Star Publishing Co., 1881) contains a short
account of my Grandfather's operations at that time.
aM. J. Forsell, "Cogitations: Nels Johan Johnson," in "The Heritage of
a Century: Elim Lutheran Church, 1854-1954," special centennial issue
of the E l i m M e s s e n g e r (Scandia, Minn.), Vol. 14, No. 5, May 1954, p. 5.
4 Vilhelm Moberg, T h e E m i g r a n t s , U n t o a G o o d L a n d , and T h e L a s t
L e t t e r H o m e , translated by Gustaf Lannestock, published by Simon &
Shuster, New York, 1951, 1954, and 1961.
15 Harry W. Palm, L u m b e r j a c k D a y s in t h e S t . C r o i x V a l l e y (Bayport,
Minn.: Bayport Printing House, Inc., 1969), 19.
' I b i d . , 5.
' The characterization used by Forsell in I b i d . , 5.
282